1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electric vehicle and, more particularly, to the electric vehicle whose batteries can efficiently be charged during travel without requiring large-scale equipment.
2. Description of Prior Art
Environmental pollution due to hazardous substances in exhaust gasses still exist even now in spite of endeavor of many years on and improvement of vehicles of gasoline engines or diesel engines.
The common conceptions of electric vehicles driven by electrically powered motors are that they run slow. However, progress in modern technologies has accomplished a substantial increase in the speed of electric vehicles, steadily accelerating practical use the general public.
Because of the absence of an engine, electric vehicles emit no exhaust gasses containing hazardous substances, thus contributing significantly to environmental conservation.
More recently, vehicles have been marketed, such as so called "hybrid cars", which feature a combination of a gasoline engine and an electric motor. Unfortunately, such vehicles still emit gasses containing hazardous substances and, furthermore suffer from complicated configurations and quite high costs resulting from a drive mechanism involving the gasoline engine and the electric motor.
As mentioned above, thanks to technological progress, current electric vehicles are capable of running at fairly high speeds without hazardous exhaust gas emissions, thus contributing significantly to environmental conservation. Unfortunately, however, such "creen" electric vehicles suffer from the following problems.
The electric vehicle is adapted to electrically charge its battery through a converter for converting AC power from a convenient home socket into DC power, or through a charger such as that located by the side of the road. Although batteries have been improved in storage capacity for electric energy over the years, the mounting space for and the weight of the battery places a limit on increases in storage capacity.
Accordingly, a driver of the electric vehicle must stop at a charger for electric charge at quite short intervals, requiring frequent cumbersome charging operations during travel. Particularly, long distance travel on freeways takes a greater amount of time to reach a destination because of the frequent stops for such charging.
In a previous known art, a great number of induction coils are embedded in a road and a power supply cable is laid laterally along the road for supplying electric power to electric vehicles during travel. Unfortunately, this art requires facilities of an extremely large scale and of a great deal of cost.